Compassion As a Path Finder to Healing

I was recently invited to write for an online global magazine. The invitation was extended to offer an integrative and wholesome view from which to see the current global climate which is full of oppositions. While writing that I could easily reckon with this: how we experience people in the world in our innermost life is not too different from how we have been experiencing them since our early childhood and adolescent years. If something has changed, it only means life had given us opportunities to shift our worldview from the ones we inherited by birth and we may have immersed with some intention towards healing work.

It is simple to empathise with them whose worldview and state matches more closely to our own. If we champion movement towards greater freedom of expressions for all then it is easy to cheer on another who are on the same page with us and are living or doing work in that direction. It is far more complex to reckon with them who believes the opposite. We don't sense the spirit of cheer for them and the movement of understanding towards them feels hindered. This may also be true of how we experience our parents, grandparents & ancestors. If we have been raised in a different world than them, with very differing value systems, we may find this movement of understanding and curiosity hampered towards our own origins too. We can either feel with much greater intensity the apathy, strong avoidance, the resignation of knowing our origins or the contempt for the past.

What I appreciate about this work of Systemic Family Constellations is the gentleness with which it offers us an alternative view. It invites curiosity on what else may be true for another person that our inner world had missed or was unable to see while being caught up in our own pain. Often in this witnessing we can see that, just like us, another person is tethered to their own pain and injuries and are often acting from that place unconsciously: the result which is perpetuation of pain.

After such profound healing experiences, if we immerse in them, the truth of our humanness dawns a lot more easily. When people ask me, which they do a lot, "How do I disrupt the cycles of trauma in my family?". The easy yet very deep response is: Who feels ready to offer compassion to the past? Who can access a slight or much expansion of the heart first to see the humanity that binds us all? If we were placed in the same situation and lineage with more privileges or lack of privileges as them, may we have acted in the same way as them?

It can't be forced surely but it can be a movement that we hold in our heart as we continue our healing work.

If you wish to learn more or consider participating in a Systemic Family Constellations workshop, you can refer here:

https://theopenconnections.podia.com/groupworkshops